Research Notes

Benefits of the Weekly Reader

A new study says that reading the Weekly Reader can increase
students' knowledge of current events--particularly in the early
elementary years.

Carolyn Huie Hofstetter and her colleagues from the University of
California, Los Angeles, and San Diego State University collected data
on 2,332 children between the ages 8 and 12 in four cities: Boston,
Chicago, Houston, and San Francisco.

Some of the students regularly read the Weekly Reader in
their classrooms. Others read another current-events periodical geared
to classroom use. Some read both, and others read none at all.

To test their knowledge of current events, all of the students took
a 29-item test.

In grades 2 and 3, the researchers found, readers of the Weekly
Reader significantly outscored students from the same grade levels
who read no classroom magazine at all or who read some other
periodical.

Curiously, the readers of Weekly Reader did even better than
students who read both that periodical and another publication. This
was true, the researchers found, even after they controlled for other
factors, such as the amount of television news the children watched at
home, that might have explained the higher scores.

Reading the Weekly Reader also appeared to give students in
grades 4 through 6 a slight edge in current-events knowledge over the
other groups of upper elementary students in the study, the researchers
found. But the differences in scores between that group and their
counterparts who did not read the publication were negligible.

"As children get older they can access other types of reading
materials like newspapers, and other curricular materials related to
current events," said Ms. Hofstetter, a UCLA doctoral student. "We
think the younger children might not be able to access those other
types of media."

Even though the Middletown, Conn.-based Weekly Reader Corp. paid for
the study, Ms. Hofstetter said the findings were a surprise to the
researchers. They expected the benefits from the periodical to
disappear once they factored in children's exposure to outside
media.

They presented their findings at the annual meeting of the American
Educational Research Association, held March 24-28 in Chicago.

Hands-On Science

It's no secret that science tests with hands-on activities are more
expensive to administer than paper-and-pencil tests. Inclined planes,
pendulums, and other equipment needed for the activities can add
up.

Also, students need more time to take the tests. Teachers and staff
members must be trained to administer the new items, and precautions
must be taken to ensure that students taking the tests cannot see other
students' work.

A study published this month in the journal Educational
Evaluation and Policy Analysis gives some idea just how much more
expensive those added considerations can be.

Researchers Brian M. Stecher and Stephen P. Klein of the RAND Corp.
analyzed the costs of six hands-on activities in a science assessment
for 2,000 5th and 6th graders. Overall, they found, the
performance-based measures cost three times as much as open-ended
writing assessments.

The cost per student was $34 per class period for a bare-bones
version of the hands-on assessments that lasted a single class period,
and $102 per student for a longer assessment spread over three
periods.

Test developers could cut expenses by using teachers rather than
hiring outside test administrators or by reducing test-development
time, the study found. Even then, the costs were still 20 times higher
than for standard multiple-choice tests for a comparable amount of
testing time. In addition, many of the costs recur yearly because
students tend to remember hands-on activities longer than they do
multiple-choice items, meaning that new test items have to be
designed.

Even so, the researchers say, the results of their analysis should
be viewed as more of a challenge than a disappointment for proponents
of the newer tests.

That challenge, they write, is "to find ways to demonstrate the
value of performance measures by showing the non-monetary benefits that
accrue from this type of assessment."

Closing the Achievement Gap

Eliminating the achievement gap between black and white students
will take decades, a University of Chicago researcher has
concluded.

Amy Claire Thoreson analyzed data on high school students culled
from six sets of national studies conducted between 1965 and 1992. The
numbers show that differences in test scores between black and white
students seem to have slowly decreased over 27 years but that they
still remain large. At the rate the gap has been shrinking so far, Ms.
Thoreson said, it will take 60 years to close.

When she adjusted the data to account for differences between black
and white students in social and economic backgrounds or the quality of
the schools they attended, the gap decreased further. But even so, Ms.
Thoreson said, "black students attending similar schools as white
students will not attain equality for 30 years." What is more, among
the top achievers, white students outnumbered African Americans by a
5-1 ratio in 1992--the same as in 1965--once socioeconomic factors are
taken into account.

Ms. Thoreson is among four graduate students who are working with
Larry V. Hedges, an education professor at the university, on a
long-term project to use national databases to analyze trends in group
differences in achievement.

The research team, which presented some of its findings at the
AERA's annual meeting, is drawing its data from the federally funded
National Assessment of Educational Progress, the National Education
Longitudinal Study, and the Longitudinal Study of American Youth, among
others.

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The third item in this article gives the wrong figure for the estimated time that it will take to eliminate the achievement gap between black and white students. The correct figure, according to the study, is 140 years.